11.22.2010

Theme: Want! — Theme answers are familiar phrases that end with words synonymous with desire.

Theme answers:

21A: Tokyo monetary unit (JAPANESE YEN).

26A: 1983 Lionel Richie #1 song (ALL NIGHT LONG).

43A: Desolate title tree in a 1936 Fonda/MacMurray western (LONESOME PINE).

50A: TUMS target (STOMACHACHE).

65A: Hanker, and a synonym for the ends of 21-, 26-, 43- and 50-Across (YEARN).

Well this is just what we need on a Monday, right? A super smooth solve — not too hard but not boring either. This grid is filled with words that I think of as one level above the typical Monday: BAD EGG, CONJOIN, LAMENT, TENACITY, QUOI. Nothing particularly awesome about those words, but they add a little pizzazz to an easy puzzle. We're off to a good start this week.

Bullets:

31A: French city where Joan of Arc died (ROUEN). This was probably the trickiest thing in the grid. I didn't know it off the top of my head, but with a few crosses it came back to me.

33A: Milk units: Abbr. (QTS.). I tried "pts." first.

46A: It's north of the border (CANADA). Can't wait to hear from our Canadian friends about this one.

49A: Cle. hoopsters (CAVS). I was flying through this puzzle pretty fast and wrote in "Mavs" thinking "Somehow that doesn't seem quite right."

7D: "March Madness" org. (NCAA). Seems like "March Madness" is right around the corner. How the hell did it get to be Thanksgiving week already?!?

Once again we see that old English philosopher William of Ockham and his famous razor. OCCAM’S Razor is a line of reasoning that says “the simplest answer is often correct.” What good advice for me in solving crossword puzzles.

@PG - The 'Nucks should have no problem with being North of the border (except for their universal desire to be south of the border), as they have only one border which to be north/south of. We 'mericans however got confused by this one, as we are the ones north of one of our borders.

LONESOMEPINE? 1936? I think my father took me to that one, but we had to leave because the organist who played the background music got sick or something. No wait, they did infact have talkies by then, my father wasn't even born yet, so I must be thinking about a different, totally unknown, movie.

Good Morning! Had fun with this today. As a relative newbie at these things this may be the first time I've solved without a problem. OK, I lied, I had Bad Guy before cBed Egg came to me via Readers Digest. And I had to Google "Lonesome Pine". Still managed to finish in 13 minutes - Yay Me!!

Wow, I actually got a Canadian to respond to an insult*! Thats' a first.

@Crosscan - You're absolutely correct in that there's nothing north of the border. As the entirety of Canada is north of the border, well Canada is nothing.

* Gentility requires me to apologize for the insult. See, I genuinely think of myself as being bigotry free (to the extent possible), but that's a difficult way to live. We all want to feel superior, and if you've dedicated yourself to being bigotry free, that means you actually have to be superior, all the time, in every way, and that's just way too much work. So, when I'm lazy, don't actually want put out the effort to be a decent human being, well, I just permit myself to pick on Canadians. They don't fight back.

Speedy, smooth Donna Levin puzzle with a fun theme. I've finally graduated to doing my early week puzzles in ink. Only had one BAD EGG. I wrote in STOMACH ACID instead of ACHE. Obviously, I hadn't figured out the theme yet.

Also had STOMACH ACid before STOMACH ACHE and then tried to drive SEVdNTY on the Interstate - didn't get very far.

BOSC, LOIN, TATER, DELI, SUB, BAD EGG, EATEN, DIGEST, STOMACH ACHE, eventually leading to YAKS? Is it me or is there an overindulgent mini-theme here? Must be getting close to Thanksgiving. Time to get out the stretch pants.

Love CANADA! Great skiing! Great AURA of the aurora borealis! (Used-to-be) great exchange rate for my C-SPOTs! Mounties are a little cranky, though. Once got a ticket for driving SEVdNTY through a construction zone. My defense? Hey, it's only kilometers. Not like it's *really* speeding. That logic didn't get me very far with them.

Went to add "Lonesome Pine", (1936), to my Netflix queue and found out that it was the first movie with outdoor scenes in color.

Pleasant Monday puzzle. Had writeovers PINE/dovE, CSPOT/Cnote, and ONCD/ONCe. Do they really record music on CDs? I would think they use either tape or solid state memory, edit, and then write the finished music to CD. Or am I picking a nit?

Sfingi, Cav=Cleveland Cavaliers. Formerly home to arguably the best player in the NBA, LeBron James. No more as he decided to jump ship and play for a team that has a shot at winning a championship. Widely reviled for phoning in his performance in the Playoffs this year, knowing he wouldn't be with the Cavs much longer.

Hated ON CD. As a former musician I can tell you that no professional recording has ever been made on CD. The CD is the consumer end product, inferior to the master tape from which it came. And JAPANESE YEN is thoroughly meh.

Some interesting words for a Monday though, like DREY and SLUG.

Monday puzzles get a lot of abuse here, but I thought this one was pretty good.

@Crosscan - We love Canada. We've actually been there. It is clean - not a speck on the subways, even. To reword my mom - it's l city ike Pre-WWII. Montreal charming and quaint. Toronto is modern and chic. Seems like half "our" talent is from Canada, eh? And it's never too damn hot. Oh Canada!

Wow, I sure breezed through this one. Got LONESOME PINE entirely from crosses, without even noticing. When I saw it in @PG's writeup, I was all, "where was that in the grid?" There were a couple of short answers like that, too.

@JaxinL.A.: Agreed; the puzzle didn't insult me at all. Now Pete, on the other hand, is doing a fine job.

@Scully2066, conjoined means something that is put together, not something that is born or made that way. As the word says, it is something that is together ("con-") united ("-joined").

I'm sure you are thinking of conjoined twins, in which case we can infer that the original usage either intended to mean that some other force (be it God, the mother, nature, etc.) had joined the twins together, or the biological explanation which is that a single baby develops from what would be two separate zygotes/twins (or a dividing fertilized egg that does not quite divide all the way), which are joined together (con-).

It doesn't necessarily mean that "join" is an action here, rather it can also be an adjective. This would be the case that you thought was the singular definition. If you weren't thinking of twins, but objects that are made conjoined (like a chain or the like), we could also argue that the maker of these objects had to unite the components at some point in time.